A grunt’s eye view of the War in Iraq has won the world’s only prize for blogs that have been turned into books.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell yesterday beat 110 entries from 15 countries to claim the £5,000 2007 Blooker Prize, sponsored by Lulu, the self-publishing website.

The former US army machinegunner’s visceral account of his experiences battling insurgents and boredom in the Sunni Triangle has received critical acclaim. The late Kurt Vonnegut, Buzzell’s idol and the author of one of the 20th century’s most abiding portraits of war in Slaughterhouse-Five, wrote him a fan postcard before he died last month. Reviews have compared My War to the classics Catch22, M*A*S*H and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.

Arianna Huffington, one of the judges and the proprietor of the influential blog Huffington Post, said: “Buzzell never takes the easy route of painting Iraq in black and white. His account gives flesh-and-blood – and anger, scorn, bile, and unexpected humour – to the Iraq debacle. His delightfully profane account loses nothing in the transformation from blog to book.”

Speaking from his home in Los Angeles Buzzell, 30, described how he had become a writer “by accident”. Growing up in a north Californian suburb he was “into punk rock and skateboarding” but otherwise directionless.

“I was going from deadend job to deadend job so I decided at age 26 that joining the military was the way to fix all my problems.” A year later he was in Iraq, where he rapidly became a regular visitor to the cybercafé tent. “At first I wrote out of boredom, as something to do between missions. Then I found it was therapeutic. I developed this dark sense of humour out there as a way of dealing with what I was seeing.” In his anonymous blog, which carried the image of Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece, Guernica, Buzzell wrote about killing enemy fighters and the terror he experienced on missions, but also about camp life.

“When people think war they think bullets and combat but I wrote about the everyday stuff that a soldier has to go through. Just hanging out with the guys, smoking cigarettes and talking about what we would do when we got home. Everything but the politics of the war. It sort of took off on the internet, I was getting hundreds of e-mails a day.”

In the eight weeks before the US Army stopped him from blogging, literary agents started e-mailing him. He signed a deal with Penguin and the resulting book has since been translated into seven languages.

Buzzell, who left the Army two years ago, is now trying to establish himself as a freelance journalist in California.

The inaugural Blooker competition, held last year, was won by Julie Powell, a New Yorker who chronicled her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in a 1961 guide to French cookery in a single year.

Buzzell’s life

''I found out about this blog website stuff in an article that was printed in the new Time magazine. It sounded like a good way for me to kill some time out here in Iraq, post a little diary stuff, maybe some rants, thoughts, experiences, garbage, crap, whatever. I have no set formula on how i’m going to do this, i’m just going to do it and see what happens. You think the Sex Pistols knew what the f*** they were doing when they first started jamming? They just f***in’ did.''

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• 'Was it real?' The US bailout nightmare
• Iranian opposition plays the long game